DeepYard

Helicone vs Portkey

Side-by-side comparison built from DeepYard's structured catalog. Content updated Aug 21, 2026.

Direct Answer

Helicone suits teams needing freemium $20/mo, azure openai focus, and 6,093 GitHub stars in current listing data. Portkey suits teams needing freemium free tier, api gateway focus, and 12,794 GitHub stars in current listing data. This summary reflects catalog metadata only for decision support, not independent testing.

What this comparison weighs

  • Pricing and free-tier availability
  • License model and deployment fit
  • GitHub adoption and contributor depth
  • Catalog tags, integrations, and supported workflows
H

Helicone

Open-source LLM observability proxy with one-line integration

OSSfreemium
6.1K6d ago96
Visit GitHub
P

Portkey

AI gateway with guardrails, caching, and observability for 200+ LLMs — 11K+ stars

OSSfreemium
12.8K12w ago102
Visit GitHub
MetricHeliconePortkey
GitHub Stars6.1K12.8K
Contributors96102
Last CommitAug 16, 2026May 25, 2026
Open Issues150245
Licenseopen-sourceopen-source
Pricingfreemiumfreemium
Free TierYesYes
Categorydev-toolsdev-tools
TrendingNoNo

Choose Helicone if you need

  • • Helicone is the stronger pick when Azure Openai matters because that capability is listed only on its profile.
  • • Helicone is the cleaner fit if you specifically need Proxy workflows from the catalog tags.

Choose Portkey if you need

  • • Portkey stands out for Api Gateway workflows that are not listed for Helicone.
  • • Portkey is the stronger pick when Gemini matters because that capability is listed only on its profile.
  • • Portkey shows broader GitHub adoption with 12,794 stars versus 6,093 for Helicone.

Meaningful differences

  • • Pricing model: Helicone is listed as freemium from $20/mo, while Portkey is listed as freemium.
  • • Workflow emphasis: Helicone highlights Observability, while Portkey highlights Api Gateway.
  • • GitHub adoption: Helicone shows 6,093 stars versus 12,794 for Portkey.
  • • Contributor count: Helicone lists 96 contributors and Portkey lists 102.

Shared capabilities

  • • Observability
  • • Open Source
  • • Openai
  • • Anthropic

Shared Tags

observabilityopen-source

Only in Helicone

proxycost-trackingllm-ops

Only in Portkey

api-gatewayguardrailscachingmulti-model

Limitations and evidence

  • • DeepYard compares structured public metadata; this is not an independent benchmark unless a test record is shown.
  • • Signals such as stars, contributors, and last commit indicate public activity, not purchase fit or runtime quality.
  • • Pricing and feature coverage reflect the stored listing snapshot and may lag vendor changes between refreshes.

Source links

Manifest content date: 2026-08-21

About Helicone

Helicone is an open-source observability platform for LLMs that works as a transparent proxy — add one line to your base URL and immediately get request logging, cost tracking, latency histograms, and user-level analytics. It supports caching, rate limiting, and prompt management out of the box, making it one of the fastest ways to add production visibility to any OpenAI-compatible API call.

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About Portkey

Portkey is an AI gateway that sits between your application and LLM providers, offering unified API access to 200+ models, automatic retries and fallbacks, semantic caching, spend tracking, guardrails, and request/response logging. Production-grade reliability layer for AI applications.

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